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I’ve hired a lot of people, let go some of them, a few of them went to Facebook & Google and a couple to start their own companies. In all these ups & downs, the one strong quality I’ve noticed with people whom I enjoy working (and who are really damn good) is… annoyance. In a positive outlook, it may be called obsession but the feeling expressed to show your obsession is usually annoyance at something wrong/missing. There are so many variables in a startup that it’s not possible to control everything. An easy solution can be to just give … Continue reading Hiring lessons Part 3 – Annoyance

I’ve made a ton of mistakes in hiring people and wanted to write down the lessons I’ve learnt till now. I’m not sure how many parts this post would have, here’s the first one anyway. Speed vs hire Why does a company having 5x more programmers than you, move slowly or at the same pace as you? Apart from the overhead to manage more people, it’s the failure to maintain a high hiring bar that’s causing the slowness. I made this mistake. It’s a very rationale thing for anyone to ensure that the hiring bar is kept high. But why do … Continue reading Hiring lessons – Part 1

Enough has been said about the war for talent in the valley. It’s definitely hard to hire good engineers and it’s just ending up in a zero sum game where Google tries to poach from Facebook, Facebook from Twitter, Twitter from … and so on. And then there are a few engineers in these companies who’d like to work for a startup mostly because they’d want to do one in the near future. In fact, someone built a site for that. It’s getting increasingly easy for good hackers to start companies. Startups are becoming almost risk-free because even if you … Continue reading Immigration